Tag Archives: eggplant

I feel it happening, somewhere in my bones, the change from summer to fall. Summer is still roaring, the temperatures often above 90, the humidity frizzing my hair and causing makeup to weep off my face, the sun bright and baking. Somewhere, though, the seed of fall has cracked open. Maybe it’s the early morning air, the coolness that’s creeping in. Maybe it’s the beginning of a new semester: new faces, familiar faces, essays I’ve read and essays I’ve not yet read. I can feel it, the change that’s going to come. I’m savoring every moment of summer while it is still with me, but at the same time anticipating the crisp breezes and the smell of cinnamon and dead leaves drying on the lawn. Making pots of chili and baking apples and sitting outside with a hot cup of coffee and a book.

I also feel the change in a more symbolic sense.

There have been a few times in my life when I felt great life changes before they happened, when I knew something was coming before knowing just what, when I could tell something had altered inside of me, knowing that the alteration would eventually ripple its way outward. I remember coming back to Wilmington after my first trip to Congo in 2009. Everything felt shifted. Something in me was moving somewhere, and I wasn’t sure where. Friendships that had seemed vital to me lost something, felt increasingly more hollow. The church we felt was home felt less and less so. I felt unmoored.

In 2011, it was the month in San Francisco. I came home from that more centered in myself, more alive to my own internal being. Maybe it was the fog in the Inner Sunset, where I lived that month, maybe it was the fog that grayed everything out and gave me permission to be introspective, to be alone, to be quiet. Every time I took the N-Judah to downtown, I could almost tell you the exact street where the fog would lift and the sun would break through, and I still remember passing the bakery where that happened, and the park just past it; I stared out that train window and watched people play Frisbee with their dogs, the grass impossibly green, the sky impossibly blue, the houses pastel and perfect, and I knew life was delicious in ways I had never imagined.

When I came home from that month away, I had only a few months before we received Tom’s diagnosis. I would learn that life is painful in ways I couldn’t have imagined either.

Now, in 2014, after China, after those two months on the other side of the world, I am back home, and I am different yet again. I don’t think even I myself will understand it for a good, long time. I am more excited by things—by the blueness of the ocean, by the taste of eggplants. I am feeling bolder, feeling less apologetic for what I think and what I love. I am feeling decisive.

I have taken up cycling. My sister-in-law is training for the biking portion of a triathlon, and she’s letting me train with her. We get up early to ride a nearby neighborhood with wide paths snaking by houses we’ll never afford. The sun is buttery, beautiful at that time of day, and I breathe deeply as I work the bike, as I see what my legs can do, as I learn to balance myself and the bike. It feels good, it feels deeply good. Because I like the changes, I love every change I’ve made, and I feel more myself now than I ever have been in the past.

Last night, Jesse’s band played a show on a nearby island, and I stayed home and cooked and read and took a bubble bath. I made myself chapatis and baba ghanouj. I ate a peach that was sweeter and juicier than any I’ve had in a long time. The peach was a shocking color, so rich and so bright. The juice ran down my fingers, and I sat at our little kitchen table, eating alone, and I felt very happy.

Madhur Jaffrey’s Baba Ghanouj (Creamed Eggplant)From World Vegetarian

Ingredients:

1 large eggplant3 Tbsp olive oil1 Tbsp lemon juice1 tsp salt

Directions:

Prick eggplant with a fork and roast in a 450-degree oven until collapsing and very soft inside (mine took an hour). Peel and roughly chop the eggplant. Blend or process eggplant with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt, until creamy and smooth.

“I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.” M.F.K. Fisher